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Donald's better at golf than Michael Bloomberg. And he's better at politics, too. Credit: CLINT SPAULDING/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
There is nothing new about the observation that nerds make terrible politicians. The term itself may be born of the information age — first as a term of abuse, then increasingly as a badge of pride — but thousands of years ago, the philosophers of the ancient world were grappling with a distinction that helps explain why nerdy politicians keep tripping themselves up in the public square. Politics is an art, not a science. It requires techne, not episteme.
Take the current row about self-confessed “data nerd” (see Twitter profile) and Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg and his recently unearthed comments about farming. Bloomberg is a poster boy of the digital age. A Harvard Business school alumnus, he made his billions — more than 60 of them — from selling computer software to the financial services industry. That made him the 12th richest person in the world. But for all this lucrative data savvy — or perhaps because of it — Bloomberg has shown himself to be excessively clumsy in his reflections on the degree of difficulty required to grow crops. Speaking to a group of Oxford University students in 2016, soon after Trump became President, Bloomberg reflected on a contrast between the intellectual demand of farming and that of the information age:
“If you think about it, the agrarian society lasted 3,000 years, and we can teach processes. I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offence intended — to be a farmer. It’s a [process]. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.”
“Now comes the information economy, and the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyse. And that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set. You have to have a lot more gray matter.”
Supporters of Bloomberg have insisted that these remarks have been taken out of context. His opponents, from Trump to Sanders, have used them as evidence that Bloomberg is out of touch with middle America, and with the all-important rural constituency in particular. And there is little doubt these comments have damaged him. But what is going on here is more foundational than mere optics. For what data nerd Michael Bloomberg is revealing in these comments is the tendency of the nerd mentality to reduce certain forms of practice, and the practical intelligence required by them, to pieces of information. It is the subjection of techne by episteme.
To use the philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 representation of the issue, the distinction here is one between different forms of knowledge; as he put it, the difference between “knowing-that” (roughly speaking, episteme) and “knowing-how” (techne). Here is an illustration of the difference. Imagine I ask you if you know how to swim, and you say “yes, of course”. But when you get into the water, you sink to the bottom and need rescuing. “I thought you said you knew how to swim,” I challenge. “Oh, I do,” comes the reply. “I have read many books on the physics of buoyancy and about the mechanisms of human propulsion through water. I know all there is to know about how to swim.”
In other words, knowing-how is not necessarily reduceable to knowing-that. You can know all the science there is of swimming or bicycling or farming, but be absolutely rubbish at doing it. Conversely you can be Mark Spitz in the water and not know the first thing about the physics of buoyancy. In other words, farming may (and does) contain a wisdom that cannot be boiled down to “you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn”.
Among those things that Plato identifies as a techne — including weaving, music, cookery, riding a chariot, farming — is that of politics. Politics is a craft as much as it is a science. And those, like Bloomberg, who have been schooled in the information age may have a handle on all of the graphs and data points that are available, but without a sense that politics is an art, and without the knowing-how talent at practising it, the nerdish would-be politician is bound to fail. Take heed, Dominic Cummings.
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